New DVDs: Douglas Fairbanks

The independent DVD publisher Flicker Alley has been the source of some of the most interesting and carefully produced editions of silent movies in the marketplace today, and the company’s new box set, Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer, is perhaps the company’s finest so far. The five disc collection includes ten features and one short, tracing Fairbanks’s development from his first films for Triangle (”His Picture in the Papers,” 1916) though his first costume swashbuckler, the 1920 “The Mark of Zorro.” Fairbanks was perhaps the first star to emerge from the new feature-length format that developed around 1912, taking advantage of the longer running times to develop his character — a bright young American, fired up by athletic energy and a sense of self-determination — beyond the broadly drawn, burlesque figures of the one and two-reel comedies of the nickelodeon era. The centerpiece of the collection is Allan Dwan’s 1917 “A Modern Musketeer,” a film thought to exist only in an incomplete form until the missing reels were discovered in the collection of the Danish Film Institute. Newly restored, and with a first rate score by Rodney Sauer’s Mont Alto Moving Picture Orchestra, the film turns out to be another thrilling demonstration of Dwan’s early mastery of continuity editing, which by this point had surpassed Griffith’s. My review for the New York Times is here.

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